Month: October 2017

An overview of Intel Optane technology -- Shattering the I/O Bottleneck

Sanjeev Trika
Intel
Abstract: 
The I/O bottleneck has been a longstanding problem on computing platforms; disks are much slower than memory which is much slower than the CPU. While this is typically addressed by various forms of data and instruction caching and tiering, there remains a large gap between performance, cost, and densities of storage and main memory. We are tackling this problem head-on with IntelTM Optane technologies. The technologies use a new Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) which effectively fills the gap, and can be used in both Solid-State Drive and extended-memory applications. We introduce new metrics for evaluating performance of such fast NVM that can be used for both storage and memory applications, present results on example applications, and challenge the audience to innovate new system-level and application-level usages.
Speaker Biography: 
Sanjeev Trika is a Principal Engineer, and Director of Firmware/Software R&D, in the NVM Solutions Group (NSG) at Intel Corp. He leads key innovations in storage technologies, and holds 30+ patents.

Coming Soon to a Podium Near You...

A talk is like a movie trailer for your paper -- if you do your job, the audience should be excited to read it.

Movie trailers can rely on suspense, mystery, and movie stars to build excitement.  You, however, will have to rely on the clear, direct communication of the WHY, WHAT, and HOW of your work, and that requires careful thought and judicious choices about what keep in and what to leave out.Read more


Andiry Presents NOVA-Fortis at SOSP in Shanghai

Andiry described building the world's first fault-tolerant non-volatile main memory file system at SOSP'17 in Shanghai.  The resulting file system -- NOVA-fortis -- provides a mechanism to take consistent snapshots to facilitate backups and protects both metadata and file data from media and software errors.  Here's the full paper.

While he was on the continent, Andiry is also presenting NOVA at Tsinghua University, Wuhan university, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

Well done, NOVA hackers!


WHY, WHAT, and HOW

Learning to identify good research problems and building successful projects around them is the core skill you will learn in graduate school.  Until you master this skill, the distinction between good research topics and bad can  seem mysterious and arbitrary.  A first step in learning to identify good research is to realize that most successful systems research projects answer three questions:   WHY is it interesting?  WHAT does it contribute?  and HOW does it do it?Read more